“He was leaving?” Bea asked, leaning forward in her chair, as any change in the victim’s status was noteworthy. “When did he give his notice?”
“Yesterday,” Joseph replied. “And no amount of money Mr. Mayhew offered him could induce him to change his mind, so perhaps he was bored to flinders.”
It was quite startling, Bea thought, that the footman of a neighboring property would be privy to so much private information. “You are very well informed.”
A light flush colored his cheeks at the observation, but he kept his eyes steady as he explained that he had overheard Monsieur Alphonse telling Mrs. Wallace his plans. “But I wasn’t eavesdropping,” he said, rushing to deny the accusation before it might be lodged. “I would never stoop to such shameful behavior. I just happened to be in the stillroom cleaning the bottles when he came to talk to her and he was excited and spoke so loudly I could not help but overhear. He said he was going to Paris to open a patisserie, and that it didn’t matter how much money Mr. Mayhew offered him to remain, he would not stay. He was leaving in a few days and wanted Mrs. Wallace to come with him.”
Suddenly and strangely, Marlow squeaked.
Chapter Four
In the amount of time it took for Bea to look from Joseph to Marlow, she constructed and dismantled an overwrought three-act tragedy around the brief, jarring sound: Secret love! Thwarted passion! Seething jealousy!
Afraid of rejection and desperate to maintain domestic tranquility, the butler had managed to successfully repress his feelings—until the day Mrs. Wallace received a proposal of marriage from an upstart Frenchmen who would dare install her in a patisserie. For her to go from keeping house in the finest establishment in all of London to serving cakes to petit bourgeois in Paris was an intolerable relegation, and he could not allow it.
No, honor demanded a response, and determined to save the love of his life from the wanton self-destruction of foreign commerce, he raced across the square, wielding a…wielding a…
But here Bea’s imagination failed her because she had no idea what weapon Marlow would wield to vanquish a romantic rival, and even if she could figure out the implement (something silver, she concluded, and polished to a high shine, the better to see the spark of righteous indignation in his eyes), she simply could not picture him swinging it with furious abandon until the illustrious chef’s head was removed from his body.
The difficulty was not that he lacked the strength to sunder a neck completely, nor that he was deficient in the strong emotions necessary for a violent response, as he had clearly spent years stifling his passions. No, the issue was she simply could not reconcile the indignity of the carnage with the butler’s exalted demeanor. The sheer untidiness of decapitation would offend him—all that blood spurting in all those directions! Surely, he could not be expected to mop up the mess?
More likely, the sound he’d expelled was the result of the mundane considerations of staffing. The prospect of having to accustom himself to a new housekeeper, perhaps one not as capable or receptive to his guidance as Mrs. Wallace, was no doubt an unpleasant one. Or maybe the explanation was even simpler still: He was alarmed to discover his management was so lax he failed to notice a romance flourishing directly under his nose.
That would be a gross oversight for a butler as profoundly formidable as Marlow.
Examining him now for some indication that she had not imagined the noise, she found his expression as impassive as ever. Joseph’s visage was equally bland, but she refused to let that sway her.
Marlow had undeniably made a peep.
Ruminating on it further, however, felt like a distraction from the more pressing issue, and she returned her attention to Joseph to ask how the housekeeper responded to the proposal.
“She refused,” he said, pausing slightly as if allowing the butler a moment to digest the information. Then he added, “But she assured him it wasn’t because she did not enjoy his company. She was very clear that her refusal to go had nothing to do with her feelings for him. It was simply that Paris was so full of French people and very far away from her mother, and besides, she had never really wanted to travel anywhere but to Dorset because she loved being near the sea.”
Although Mrs. Wallace could not be faulted for her logic, as Paris did indeed contain quite a great many people of Gallic extraction, Bea rather thought her decision had a little something to do with her feelings for the chef. If they had been warm enough, then she would have been inclined to put up with a host of inconveniences, including fewer visits with her mother.
“How did Monsieur Alphonse react to her rejection?” she asked. She titled her eyes slightly to the left to observe Marlow’s response but had little hope of noting anything of interest. Having allowed one revealing squeak to escape, he was unlikely to permit another.
“He claimed to feel great despair,” Joseph replied with pointed emphasis.
The implication was impossible to miss, and Bea asked why the footman doubted the sincerity of the statement.
“Well, he did not seem particularly despairing, did
